Generative AI represents just one element of the broader SaaS revolution transforming enterprise IT. Most organizations are becoming SaaS-first enterprises, permanently displacing centralized IT architectures. This decentralized environment creates significant challenges for security teams striving to maintain cyber resilience.
Manual security audits cannot keep pace with daily configuration changes, rendering them ineffective. Traditional and first generation SaaS security approaches are merely point-in-time snapshots that fail to capture an organization’s true SaaS attack surface, and rarely help teams reduce risk or improve security posture in a continuous, scalable way. This explains why 58% of organizations suffered a SaaS security incident in the past year, citing key concerns over the ability to manage decentralized SaaS and the risk that this poses.
Read further to understand how to transform your SaaS security posture, shifting it from a reactive and unmanageable challenge to a strategic business enabler.
The Challenge: A Perfect Storm
Several converging factors are creating SaaS security challenges that result in the attack surface expanding daily and out of reach of security teams:
- Decentralized ownership: Your sales team owns the CRM tool, engineering manages their development tools, and HR controls workforce SaaS systems, with security teams often unable to monitor and remediate risks consistently, if at all.
- Visibility: Many tools only focus on sanctioned SaaS, resulting in an incomplete picture of the complete SaaS footprint as it pertains to the extent of shadow SaaS use and risk – with gen AI tools adopted by employees a case in point.
- Identity and privilege sprawl: Dormant employee accounts, guest users with excessive privileges, and hundreds of non-human identities from third-party integrations and service accounts continue to proliferate daily.
A Framework for Transforming Your SaaS Security
1. Discover Your Entire SaaS Ecosystem
Have visibility over all sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS. Many SaaS security solutions only focus on sanctioned applications, this leaves dangerous blindspots for organizations particularly as it relates to unsanctioned SaaS adopted by employees. The latest wave gaining popular adoption by employees are gen AI tools, with some of these like DeepSeek, which pose significant cyber risk to the enterprise. This specific challenge was identified as a top 3 security challenge and looks to stay top of mind for the foreseeable future.
Discovery must be continuous and comprehensive, not a point-in-time exercise focussed only on sanctioned SaaS, but also include the discovery of unsanctioned SaaS. This continuous and comprehensive visibility is the foundation for reducing risk.ֿ
2. Secure All Human and Non-Human Identities
Secure all SaaS identities. Comprehensively track current employees, former employees, contractors, partners, as well as non-human identities, including service accounts, integrations, and OAuth tokens.
Answer 5 critical questions:
- Who has access to what, including what SaaS is being accessed locally without corporate SSO?
- Which accounts have privileged access?
- Which dormant accounts should be deprovisioned?
- Which integrations connect to sensitive data?
- Can you detect and be alerted when a human or non-human SaaS identity goes rogue?
3. Assess and Strengthen Security Posture
Evaluate security configurations against best practices for each application. This sounds easy, but proves to be a significant challenge across the hundreds of applications used in a typical environment. It is important to establish baseline configurations for each application and continuously monitor for drift.
Organizations should be monitoring for deviations from best practice as it relates to authentication and data security controls. Some of the aspects of authentication that should be monitored include password hygiene, MFA enforcement and identities with excessive privileges. When it comes to data security, you should pay careful attention to drift from data security policies, in particular, detecting any instances of file sharing with open links as well as risky and sensitive file sharing.
4. Remediate Data Exposure Risks Frequently
Target easy attack surface risk reduction wins with auto-remediation. Many existing SaaS security solutions do a great job lighting up all of the risks but do a very poor job of enabling security teams to remediate and reduce the attack surface on an ongoing and sustained basis. Choose a security solution that supports the streamlining of remediation workflows for each application. By identifying and removing unnecessary data access, for example revoking file-sharing from inactive identities, significantly reduces attack surface risk, while improving overall compliance posture.
5. Implement Continuous Threat Detection
Access management for SaaS alone isn't sufficient. Deploy threat detection capabilities for suspicious behaviors such as unusual login locations, impossible travel, mass downloads, or privilege escalation. Connect these detections to your SIEM or SecOps workflows for a coordinated response.
The Path Forward
SaaS security cannot be addressed through fragmented approaches. The volume, velocity, and decentralized nature of sanctioned and un-sanctioned SaaS adoption demands an operational framework supported by a purpose-built SaaS security solution.
When it comes to selecting a security solution, it is important to prioritize capabilities based on the realities of your environment and not on the limitations of what each vendor can provide. Choose a vendor that addresses SaaS risk in its entirety, focussing not only on visibility but also supporting remediation workflows that are loved by security teams. This approach is essential for enabling business agility while also having the necessary security in place.
It's time to find and fix SaaS risks. Click here for a demo.
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